---
title: "Marcian \"Ted\" Hoff"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Marcian E. Hoff"
aliases: ["Ted Hoff","Marcian Hoff","M.E. Hoff"]
first_seen: "2026-08-15T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["LMS algorithm","Adaline","Intel 4004","Bernard Widrow","microprocessor"]
seek_code_commit: "17d9798"
---


American electrical engineer who, as a Stanford PhD student under [[entity-bernard-widrow|Bernard Widrow]] in the early 1960s, co-invented the least-mean-squares (LMS) filter and the ADALINE neural network, then went on to Intel, where he is credited with the general-purpose-processor architecture that became the Intel 4004 (1971) — the first commercial microprocessor. Matters to this vault as a single-person bridge between two clusters that don't usually share a sentence: 1960s neural-network/adaptive-filter theory ([[moc-backpropagation-origins]]) and the invention of the general-purpose CPU.

## References
- 2026-07-09: co-invented LMS/ADALINE with Widrow at Stanford, then joined Intel in 1968 and is credited with the general-purpose-processor architecture that became the 4004. ([[claim-ted-hoff-widrow-phd-student-architected-intel-4004]])
- 2026-08-15: co-authored, with Widrow, "Adaptive Switching Circuits" (1960 IRE WESCON) — the original paper introducing the LMS rule, describing its error surface as "stochastic" and its weight update as single-pattern steepest descent. ([[claim-widrow-hoff-1960-original-paper-describes-lms-as-stochastic-steepest-descent]])